Computers have become increasingly commonplace in our world and offer a variety of different functionality. Some computers are designed primarily for individual use, while others are designed primarily to be accessed by multiple users and/or multiple other computers concurrently. These different functionalities are realized by the use of different hardware components as well as different software applications that are installed on the computers.
Although the variety of available computer functionality and software applications is a tremendous benefit to the end users of the computers, such a wide variety can be problematic for people (e.g., system administrators) that are tasked with keeping the computers running. System administrators are oftentimes responsible for applying particular policies to computers in a system, and these policies can differ for different computers. Different types of policies can be applied, such as policies regarding whether firewalls should be enabled, policies regarding data integrity (e.g., encryption, access control, backup, etc.), policies regarding user access, and so forth. Given the large number of computers that may be included in a system that a system administrator may be responsible for, and the dynamic nature of these systems due to computers being added and/or removed, ensuring that the desired policies are applied to the appropriate computers can be a very burdensome task. Thus, it would be beneficial to have a way to ease the burden of applying policies to computers.